


June 30th, 1976.

by mousepatrol



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, old roleplay drabble, severus cries to his mother after fifth year, thats all it is really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 00:57:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14801289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mousepatrol/pseuds/mousepatrol
Summary: also known as: There Are Some Things You Can't Fix





	June 30th, 1976.

He sat alone in his carriage for the first time. Even Amycus knew that his dormmate didn’t want to be bothered.

The train ride had been agonizing, and every minute longer he endured seemed to tear him apart even further. His heart felt like it was in a vice; he could barely breathe, and he couldn’t think about anything except the fatal words he’d spoken only days before. 

His eyes were red and puffy, burning from the sleepless nights he’d had since the end of his exams. 

He was up before the train came to a stop, heaving his trunk off of the rack above him with all of his might. The corridor was still relatively empty as he walked through it to the nearest exit. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears, anxious and distraught, even over the blow of the whistle as they halted and his peers clambered out of their own carriages. Severus hunched over so the students that started lining up behind him might not be able to recognize him, and he was out the second the doors opened. 

His mother stood waiting, off to the side away from the crowd like he always asked, and spotted the boy dragging his trunk behind him with his head ducked down. Eileen didn’t look well-off or put-together and she knew it; his friends weren’t supposed to know the life he came from, and she understood that – though, she wished she hadn’t been the one to bring him into such an unfulfilling life to begin with. But Severus was rarely so upset about coming home that he wouldn’t even meet her eyes. 

He came around to her side and muttered quickly in her ear, “Let’s go.” Usually, he was impossible to catch after getting off the train – he hung around with every one of his friends’ families until almost no one was left and he couldn’t procrastinate coming home any longer. Something had obviously gone wrong.

The urgency in his voice said enough for her. Eileen took her son’s trembling hand and with a crack, they apparated away from King’s Cross.

The hustle and bustle of the station melted away and Severus, for once, was surrounded by silence in his house. He dropped the handle of his trunk and it clattered to the floor, still refusing to look at his mother who had taken a step back to survey him. The boy had grown a bit taller than her - the food at Hogwarts always helped - though both of them were on the shorter side. He was starting to look less like a child and more like a man, but his demeanor suggested that maturity was still slightly out of reach.

Eileen wasn’t one to beat around the bush, so after a moment she asked, “What happened?”

If Severus trusted one person in the world, it was his mother. “I fucked up.”

“Don’t use language like that.” She saw him twitch just at the phrase. “What did you do?”

He turned away from her with a pitiful little whimper and took a seat in one of the armchairs in the sitting room. He put his head in his hands, one foot tapping endlessly on the floor, and looked as if he was about to pull all of his hair out – hair that was long, tangled almost into mats, and frankly disgusting. 

Eileen sat opposite her son. No one moved for several slow minutes.

“I did something really awful.”

“It’s okay, Severus. Just tell me what you did and we can figure out a way to fix it.”

He shook his head. “You can’t fix this. No one can.”

“Well, what did you do?” Eileen leaned forward, narrowing her eyes. She was starting to get annoyed – his moaning and groaning wouldn’t get them anywhere. “I’m no Legilimens, you need to talk to me.”

Severus took a deep, shaky breath. His voice was broken and raw as he murmured, “I called Lily… A mu… Mud… I don’t want to say it.”

And he didn’t have to.

She reached over and grabbed his wrist. Severus finally looked up at her, and his face was that of death. His eyes and cheeks were sunken in and his lips chapped – Eileen doubted that he’d even slept or eaten since it’d happened, he seemed so weak and exhausted. The boy didn’t move to get away from her grasp.

“Why?”

He couldn’t hold her gaze for long, and looked away again. “I… I had just gotten out of an exam, and those pricks caught me again… Lily saw, and she came and tried to get them to stop, but… I’m so sick of not being able to stand up for myself, I – I wanted to show them what I can do and I… Didn’t want her help.”

“So you called her a mudblood?” repeated his mother; the word didn’t seem to scare her. “Didn’t I raise you with any sense?”

Severus often complained about Potter to his mother, but this time she didn’t know the whole story. Things were getting worse and worse with his posse, and sooner or later he had been bound to crack. Unfortunately, Lily had been in the crossfire. “I just wanted her to go so I could deal with it on my own! I was angry, they’d flipped me upside-down and showed my pants off to everybody!”

“That’s no excuse.”

He blinked. “I didn’t say it was…”

“Did you apologize to her?” Eileen leaned back in her seat, her expression hardened and eyes fixed on her son.

Severus bit his lip. “I tried, but she doesn’t want to speak to me anymore…”

“I don’t blame her.”

“Neither do I.”

There were several more minutes of silence, save for Severus’s foot still tapping away. His mind kept repeating the word over and over, and he thought of the girl in the home he’d visited so many times, just across town. The idea that he would never return again was heartbreaking, and he didn’t want to believe it was true. It was again his mother who spoke first and broke him from his trance.

“What are you going to do?”

Suddenly a burning hatred filled his chest. Nothing would have happened if Potter hadn’t been there. He would still have Lily if the boy had kept to his own grimy business, and Severus wanted revenge. He wanted to walk up to James and slice him into bits; to scream in his face and tell him how much of a cunt he really was for ruining one of the few good things he had. Rich-boy Potter had everything. Everything except Lily, that was, but now there was nothing stopping him from taking her. “… I’m going to get back at those arseholes if it’s the l – “

“ _Severus._ ”

The feeling died away, but it stayed waiting in the pit of his stomach. He knew his mother didn’t want him to hurt other people, regardless of what they did to him. Secretly he thought that was rubbish, but he sighed anyway and said instead, “I don’t know. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to have to see her again; th-the way she looked at me…”

“You can’t just ignore all of your mistakes.”

“Well, I can’t fix them either, so what am I supposed to do?” He looked over at his mother, brows knitted together as he blinked tears from his eyes. There was nothing he could do, it was too late for that. It was over now. There was no going back, and they both knew it.

“You live with them.”


End file.
